Whose Thinking? Foreign Funding and Influence in U.S. Think Tanks & The Foreign Agents Registration Act

Kara ElGarhy*

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires persons engaged in certain activities to influence domestic or foreign policy on behalf of foreign actors to register and publicly disclose the relationship and their activities to the Justice Department. Once a World-War-II-era relic to counter propaganda, the Act reemerged over the last decade as a central tool in U.S. efforts to combat foreign influence. U.S.-registered think tanks increasingly moved under its spotlight.

This Note examines the applicability of FARA to think tanks, organizations in the business of shaping and informing U.S. policy, as well as in the practice of accepting foreign funding. Through its guidance and practice, the Justice Department in recent years sought to clarify the statute’s scope and its enforcement priorities in regard to think tanks and other nonprofit organizations. However, these efforts served to layer broad—and, at times, misguided—discretion and a preference for hyper-particularized application on top of FARA’s already broad reach. The consequence has been a statutory regime that is unclearly targeted, largely ignored, and barely enforced. At a moment of transition, with stalled proposed changes to the statute’s implementing regulations and a drastically different enforcement environment newly signaled by the Trump Administration, this Note proposes pragmatic reforms to both relieve and exert disclosure pressure on think tanks in ways that can better fulfill FARA’s vision: to allow American policymakers and the American public to identify information that serves foreign interests.

*Editor-in-Chief, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law; J.D., Columbia Law School 2026.